BRODBECK: Winnipeg Transit has become less reliable

If Winnipeg Transit users have noticed buses are running late more often than they used to, they’re not imagining things.

According to data compiled by Transit, the percentage of weekday buses that are late has increased from 7.3% in 2009 to 11% in 2016. Buses were early 8.8% of the time on average in 2016, largely unchanged from 8.5% in 2009. And overall, the percentage of time weekday buses were considered to be on-time has fallen to 80.3% from 84.2% during that period.

That may seem like a small change in percentage terms. But applied to the 48.5 million riders that took the bus in Winnipeg in 2016, 4% represents nearly 2 million more rides a year where buses were not on time.

The data raises more questions than it answers, though, since the degree to which buses are late is just as important – maybe more important – than the percentage of buses not running on time. A bus that’s four or five minutes late is very different than one that is 15-20 minutes off-schedule. However, the data doesn’t break down into that level of detail.

Either way, it’s not great news for a municipal government still struggling to attract new transit riders. Like most major Canadian cities, Winnipeg has seen a decline in transit ridership in recent years, despite an uptick in population growth over the past decade.

There is no consensus on why ridership is down. Transit has cited relatively low gasoline prices as one possible reason while others have speculated that safety concerns on buses is discouraging some from using transit. In all likelihood, there is no single reason for the decline. However, there’s no escaping the fact that the erosion of bus reliability has coincided with a drop in ridership.

Buses are late more often and ridership is down.

Part of that has been a lack of capacity that has resulted in more “pass-ups,” where buses are so full they bypass people waiting at bus stops. That isn’t captured in Transit’s reliability data. But in March 2015, then-Transit director Dave Wardrop warned a city committee that there were “clouds on the horizon” as Transit had reached its capacity.

“There’s more pass-ups,” said Wardrop. “There’s overcrowding and in fact there’s some indications that the ridership increases are starting to slow at this point now.”

It was worse than Wardrop thought. Not only did ridership growth come to a halt that year, it declined, falling to 48.2 million passengers in 2015 from 49.9 million the previous year. It was 48.5 million in 2016.

Ridership in Winnipeg increased by more than twice the rate of population growth from 2005 to 2013. But it stalled after that, in part because of the capacity shortcomings cited by Wardrop. One of the problems is that while Transit found $138 million in capital to spend on the first leg of its Bus Rapid Transit experiment, it failed to expand its regular bus fleet as ridership and Winnipeg’s population grew. The results of that are now showing up on the street. Buses are more congested and they’re increasingly less punctual.

That wasn’t due to a lack of funding from the provincial government or from the city’s general revenues, either. The province increased its operating funding to Transit by 75% from $22.9 million to $40.1 million between 2006 and 2016. The city also increased funding to Transit, largely from property taxes, by 54% during that same period to $52.7 million.

So the question taxpayers and policymakers have to ask themselves now is, why has service deteriorated as much as it has when funding has increased by two to three times the rate of inflation over the past 10 years? Despite those funding increases, buses have become increasingly less reliable. It’s not a great return on investment.

What Transit requires is an independent assessment of its operations to take a deeper dive into some of these issues. Simply throwing more money at the status quo won’t work. History informs us of that.

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Traffic congestion not the problem

Winnipeg Transit says buses are less punctual because of greater traffic congestion. But the city’s own data shows travel times during peak weekday mornings from the Perimeter Highway to downtown have declined on three of five major roadways in recent years.

On Portage Avenue in 2009, it took an average of 22.8 minutes to drive from the Perimeter to downtown during peak AM periods, according to the city’s Community Trends and Performance annual reports. In 2016, that dropped to 20.7 minutes. For Pembina Highway average travel time fell from 20.9 minutes to 18.3 minutes during the same period. Henderson Highway dropped to 12.2 minutes from 13.7 minutes.

Travel times on Main Street rose to 21.5 minutes from 15.6 minutes while increasing on St. Mary’s Road to 21.1 minutes from 19.2 minutes.

That doesn’t mean traffic congestion along some routes is not a factor in bus reliability. But the fact travel times for vehicles on three of five major routes have declined in recent years during peak morning periods makes it less likely that traffic congestion is the main cause of Transit unreliability.

There are other variables Transit should be examining, including overall capacity.

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